Lately, I’ve been thinking about how assumptions create a lot of mischief in families, communities, and in teams and organizations. I’ve certainly blundered from my own assumptions often enough that now, whenever I catch myself feeling Absolutely Certain, I take it as a sign that an assumption or two is lurking close behind.

The reason assumptions create mischief on occasion, is that they come to us fast and casual, without a whole lot of critical thinking or testing of the data. Different from beliefs (granted, beliefs can be faulty too, but that’s another topic), assumptions are untested and often ill considered. They are conjured out of a limited amount of data — data that most often only confirms what we already believe or want to believe or need to believe. Assumptions arise out of our baser instincts.

Chris Argyris, who during his lifetime added so much to what we’ve come to understand about organizational learning, designed a mental model known as the Ladder of Inference. The Ladder of Inference makes visible the process by which our minds quickly clamber up a metaphorical ladder of thought to form assumptions (see link below to learn more).

Here’s how it happens: Whenever we experience anything in the world, millions of bits of information come at us. Based on our existing beliefs however, our minds filter in only a small fraction of that data, and doesn’t even “see” the rest. Then working with just the small amount of data our minds filtered in, we draw on our personal and cultural knowledge, and add meaning to the data. Once we assign meaning, we quickly assume we know the truth and the reality of the situation. Then we draw conclusions and adopt new beliefs about the world or reinforce old beliefs. Finally, we take actions in the “real world” as if the reality we conjured in our minds, based on incomplete and likely erroneous data and meaning, were all true.

And this is why people say to us on occasion; “What were you thinking!??!?! And we seem at a loss for words. “I just assumed…,” we say.

We conjure assumptions out of limited data that most often, confirm what we need or want to believe in the moment.Click To Tweet

Much of the time our assumptions aid us in making reasonable decisions, thousands of time per day. But when the stakes are high, assumptions have the potential to undermine even the best ideas. So how to battle the mischief caused by our assumptions? For starters, begin with being intentional about noticing as much information possible in a new situation. For several minutes, first do nothing. Notice what you see first, but then ask yourself questions like these:

1. What else do I see when I look again?

2. How might others with a different perspective from mine interpret this?

Although neuroscientists have shown that the limbic system is open and emotions are contagious between people, many leaders fail to act on this knowledge. They go about their workday moving from task to task without noting just how much they influence the people around them. They fail to remember just how much they mean to others and they miss opportunities to connect with and inspire the people they lead.

One reason for forgetting how much you mean to others is feeling like you can’t make a difference. If you think, even subconsciously, that you are only one person and one person cannot make a difference, you forget that the people around you look to you for inspiration. Never is this more true than when you are in the midst of disruptive change or downright adversity.

In order to increase your resonance, it is important for you to be mindful of how much you mean to others. Being mindful of your words, actions, demeanor, and emotions helps you to tune in to the people around you. Being mindful of these qualities calms you down, makes you humble and tender.

To increase your resonance, be mindful of just how much you mean to others.Click To Tweet

When you are mindful about how much you mean to others, you realize you have the power to inspire and transmit courage, and you choose in every daily interaction to do so.

End Note: After my friend Michael Sales Co-Founder of Art of the Future read this blog, he sent me this message and link:

“Simon and Garfield’s song, “Old Friends/Bookends” contains the following line: “Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left to you.” We all touch each other; if we’re lucky, we remember each other, we give each other meaning, experience, insight.”

I am pleased to announce my new book available from the American Nurses Association!

About This Book: An Extraordinary Form of Resilience

This is a book about an extraordinary form of resilience that I call “leadership resilience.” Leadership Resilience is defined as the experience of growing stronger in the face of adversity, and helping oneself and others to transform the negative experience into energy. This energy is then used to create new realities and possibilities not just for achieving goals, but to play a bigger game, creating organizational outcomes that serve a greater good. The book is an invitation for you to reflect and gain insights into the important difference between ordinary resilience and leadership resilience. It achieves this goal by presenting a model and a set of strategies derived from real-life stories and insights gained from experienced nurse leaders who have embodied and modeled leadership resilience during times of challenge and disruptive change.

As opposed to bouncing back, a colloquialism that represents ordinary resilience, leadership resilience is characterized by bouncing forward, by the achievement of a new and more complex equilibrium that signifies personal, professional, and organizational learning. Most leadership training and development programs do not help leaders learn what it means to practice the extraordinary resilience they need to lead in the face of adversity. Without leadership resilience insights, many nurse leaders believe they lack something vital that enables them to love their work and appreciate the meaning in how they act and what they do.

The goal of this book therefore, is to close the gap between the complex demands organizations make of nurse leaders and the personal and professional resilience tools they need to master in order to meet those demands.

Filled with insights from nurses

What I know you will love about this book is that it is filled with insights from nurses about what it takes for them to show up strong everyday to do the work they love. At the end of every chapter, you’ll also find exercises and dialogue prompts that you can use with your teams to draw resilience down into your practice every day.

To Learn More and to Order the Book from the ANA, Click on this Link:

Workshops and Keynotes

To go along with the book, I’ve developed a series of workshops and keynotes (offered exclusively through Wisdom Out) and I regularly offer complimentary one hour webinars so you can engage in an interlude of learning during your demanding day. Let me know if I can be of support to you and your organization. I would love to work with you. Please contact me at elleallison@wisdomout.com

In my previous article, titled “Women Leaders are Strong as Hell,” I wrote about the assets needed for resilient leadership and how those assets are harder to come by for women. In this post I focus on what women can do to cultivate leadership resilience.

Leveraging qualities that help everyone grow stronger from adversity, I offer a few strategies, nuanced for women:

1. Women are highly empathic. Therefore, talk about what you are passionate about related to the mission of your organization and the vexing challenges of your field, and ask others to do the same. When you do this, you build connections with and between people whose combined passions create diverse networks of resources to create innovative solutions.

Talk about what you are passionate about related to the mission of your organization and the vexing challenges of your field, and ask others to do the same.Click To Tweet

2. Women tend to sublimate their needs and put the needs of others first. Therefore, although it may seem counter-intuitive, especially during times of adversity and disruption, don’t let your world shrink. Instead increase your experiences and engage in activities and events that take you away for a while, from thinking exclusively about whatever it is that is causing consternation. The novel experiences you provide for yourself will jar your mind and create the conditions that create insight; those “ah-a moments” that reveal new possibilities, new relationships, and previously untapped resources.

Although it may seem counter-intuitive, especially during times of adversity and disruption, don’t let your world shrink. Instead increase your experiences and engage in activities and events that take you away for a while, from thinking exclusively…Click To Tweet

3. Women want to help others succeed. Therefore, sharpen the skills that make you a great advocate for others, and apply them to your ideas too. Advocacy skills, which include communication, problem solving, collaboration and inspiring and motivating others, also make you a leader whose ideas resonate and rise to the top.

Sharpen the skills that make you a great advocate for others, and apply them to your ideas too.Click To Tweet

In the end, organizations are strengthened when they deepen assets that raise up a diverse work force with equal access to leadership opportunities. Meanwhile, it’s helpful to know that you can focus on a few practices to deepen your own capacity for leadership resilience. These three are a good place to start.

About Elle

Dr. Elle Allison-Napolitano is author of several books and articles, the most recent on leadership resilience. She is founder of Wisdom Out, a leadership and organizational development company that helps people, teams and organizations sustain transformational change and bring their best initiatives to deep implementation where they can make a real difference.

Human Beings possess incredibly reliable adaptive systems that allow them to absorb, process, and bounce back from life’s vicissitudes. Beautifully, resilience is common and it works for all of us.

Because I’m interested in the nature of resilience in leadership however, I’m often asked if resilience is different for men and women in leadership roles. The completely honest answer of course, is I can’t say, for certain. What I do know is that highly resilient leaders, men and women alike, have access to at least three assets they can draw upon in times of adversity:

1. Strong and diverse networks of people who have their back, who provide them with resources, and who open doors for them.

2. Opportunities for renewal that come in the form of new and enriching opportunities and challenges.

3. An empowered voice, characterized by its ability to advocate, persuade and inspire others.

For many women, the assets that make leaders more resilient, are elusive or incredibly hard won.Click To Tweet

Certainly In the global public, we see exemplars of both genders who have cultivated all three of these assets: They have huge networks of connected groups of people who are ready to help them. They have opportunities to advance and diverge in their career. They have given TED talks, written books, and their ideas are widely embraced. Some of these individuals who are women, use their celebrity and success as evidence of an equal or at least a magnanimous playing field.

The Real Difference in Resilience Between Men and Women

Outside the global limelight however, women who aspire to leadership roles in organizations large and small, face more stresses and shocks to their resilience than men. These additional burdens, which arise out of persistent cultural and economic gender inequalities–unequal pay, fewer open doors (especially in male dominated fields), unequal respect and credit given for their ideas and contributions–undermine the assets that make leaders resilient. Worse, these added burdens diminish a woman’s ability to gain access to the good stuff–the assets–in the first place.

Compounding these risks, lurk other dangers more common to women than men over the course of their lifetimes: greater financial insecurity, sexual harassment and abuse and a pervasive message that “girls can’t do as much as boys.” These factors, common in first world countries, are the rule in undeveloped countries. Think about that.

The more diversity in an organization’s workforce, the more relevant and profitable it becomes. Ironically, the biases that undermine resilience in aspiring women leaders also undermine diversity and profitability for the enterprise.

Ironically, the biases that undermine resilience in aspiring women leaders also undermine diversity and profitability for the enterprise.Click To Tweet

So back to the original question, when it comes to leadership resilience, are there differences between men and women? I will say this, to claim the jobs they have, women in leadership have persisted in the face of more and greater risks than their male counterparts. For the majority of women in the world, the road to leadership is longer and steeper, with fewer rest stops. If nothing else, this certainly makes women leaders strong as hell.

Inspired by a desire to win back public confidence and trust, values that were lost in a mudslide of scandals, swindles, and corporate greed, students from the 2009 graduating class of Harvard Business School wrote the MBA Oath. It opens with this paragraph:

As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone. Therefore, I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term. I recognize my decisions can have far reaching consequences that affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future.

At one time, the MBA Oath was a controversial conversation starter in business and economic communities as well as in the general public. Some business people embraced the idea of a code of ethics for managers; others feel that the code unfairly implies that most or even all managers seek profit at all costs. Others simply took a cynical view of the oath, suspicious that it was an insincere marketing ploy or is simply too little too late.

Notwithstanding the controversy, back in 2009 when the oath first went viral, I appreciated the reference to serving a greater good– a value associated with wisdom as identified by scholars such as Robert Sternberg (2000), Vivien Clayton (1978), Monika Ardelt (2007), and Randall & Kenyon (2001). Sternberg’s “balance theory” of wisdom seems to be particularly in line with the MBA oath. Sternberg’s theory describes wisdom as existing when people use their intelligence, creativity, and knowledge for a common good by balancing their personal interest with the interests of others and even the larger context over the long term as well as the short term. The tension between interpersonal and intrapersonal interests, according to Sternberg, is mitigated by values that most people would agree are good and helpful.

You don’t hear much about the MBA oath these days, but my bias is to recognize it as good and helpful. I mean, it sure can’t hurt to have more business leaders generating profits not just through any means, but through means that contribute positively to a greater good, now can it?

At the risk of appearing foolish myself or at least a bit naive, I am optimistic that a cadre of new and aspiring business leaders out there, embody the spirit of the Harvard MBA oath–even if they are unfamiliar with the oath itself. The bonus is that this spirited cadre will also make wisdom more visible, practical, common, and attainable for all.

Without resilience, the everyday setbacks and surprising derailments of “best laid plans” would eventually make us wonder if we can face another day. According to the American Psychological Association (APA, 2002), resilience is the ability to adapt well to disruptive change, and literally “bounce back” to previous levels of functioning. Here is the good news: resilience is beautifully ordinary; most of us are blessed with basic systems of adaptation that allow us to soldier on even when facing incredible adversity. Ordinary resilience provides us with the strength to get on with things.

Leadership Resilience: Extraordinary

When disruptive change occurs in organizations, all eyes turn to the leader: How will he or she respond? Given the complexity of organizations, leaders cannot just bounce back when facing change and adversity; they must actually take action that inspires others to step into the new reality with hope and vision. In other words, if ordinary resilience is bouncing back and resuming the path one has been on, then leadership resilience is bouncing forward and leading not just oneself, but others, into new and ambiguous realities.

Ordinary resilience is bouncing back and resuming previous paths. Leadership resilience is forging new paths.Click To Tweet

The ability to be highly resilient and bounce forward into new realities makes leadership resilience closer to what we see in the phenomenon known as posttraumatic growth, than ordinary resilience. Like posttraumatic growth, which involves movement beyond pre-trauma levels of adaptation (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004), leadership resilience has a quality of transformation about it—it is not about staying the same, it is about becoming better as a result of the hardship.

Highly resilient leaders have a knack for bouncing back faster and with less angst than other folks. And, when they get their feet under them, highly resilient leaders hit the ground running– They move into the new realities with an optimistic eye for spotting opportunity.

Fear not leaders! You already have beautifully ordinary resilience. Your real challenge is to cultivate leadership resilience, the extraordinary ability to transform loss into opportunity and growth.

When people think of wisdom, they often think of the great ones—people who have influenced positive change on a large scale: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa—Oprah. All well and good but not without a downside: comparing ourselves to these incredible individuals puts wisdom high on a daunting mountain, out of reach for most of us who by comparison, resolve the vicissitudes of life untidily, only occasionally with the elegance associated with great wisdom. Adding to the perception that wisdom is rare and unattainable are the experts who insist it is a by product of a certain set of undefinable life experiences, undergirded by pinnacle qualities—humility, curiosity, grace, and compassion, for example—that never waver, never fail.

But this is my question: Since when did wisdom become synonymous with perfection? Even the great Wise Ones—Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and Oprah—would blush at any suggestion that they were not plagued often by misgivings, regret, loss, angst and yes, even episodes of pure foolishness. They might even agree with 18th Century writer and feminist, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who said, “To my extreme mortification, I grow wiser everyday.”

Don’t be discouraged from wisdom! To do so is to rob yourself of a great way of living.Click To Tweet

Don’t be discouraged from the path toward wisdom! To do so is to rob yourself of a really great way of living your life. In a world that needs more wisdom, more people solving problems with an eye for making things turn out well for more people, and for longer into the future, we need more people believing they can be wise.

Elle Allison Napolitano is founder and president of Wisdom Out. We provide processes, tools, and protocols to help people and organizations transform adversity into growth.

Newsletter / Article Reprint Permission: We grant you permission to post and reprint this information in your company newsletter with the stipulation that you credit Elle Allison Napolitano as the author and you provide a link to www.wisdomout.com

Some people say that “happiness” is too light a topic for leadership. But I unabashedly disagree. The sensation of happiness is like a surge of energy. This joie de vivre has a way of expanding your awareness of the world around you, increasing innovation and a sense that you are being your “true self.”

For a while I’ve been asking people to tell me what makes them happy at work. What they’ve told me not only affirms for me just how great people are, but also provides specific suggestions for wiring the workplace for happiness. Notice that the very same things that people say make them happy on the job, are also known catalysts of organizational results. In other words,when you wire your organization for happiness, you wire your organization for success.

Heres what I found:

So what do the data imply? Well, I think that this information points to some really specific practices that are completely within our control to implement. To name a few:

coaching and mentoring,

professional learning communities,

feedback systems and dashboards,

shared goal setting, delegation,

use of problem solving protocols and design processes,

celebrations of small wins,

democratization of information,

connecting people to customers and clients,

communication skills,

shared leadership and decision making

Why not understand what it takes to wire your workplace for happiness? It can’t do any harm and it just might make life and work better.

Why not understand what it takes to wire your workplace for happiness? It can’t do any harm and it just might make life and work better.Click To Tweet

To share your ideas and stories on the topic of resonance, add them to our Blog,Facebook or Twitter page.

Let me know if I can provide a leadership development workshop or keynote for your organization.

Best Regards,

Elle Allison Napolitano, PhD.

Wisdom Out Founder

Newsletter / Article Reprint Permission: We grant you permission to post and reprint this information in your company newsletter with the stipulation that you credit Elle Allison Napolitano as the author and you provide a link to www.wisdomout.com

New Year beginnings are AWESOME. Even if you choose to forego drafting a personal list of “resolutions,” you probably still feel eager to make things happen in your life and leadership work in 2014. Leaders who understand how contagious emotions are, make it their business to transmit emotions that inspire action in themselves and in others. Here are five tips for being a more resonant leader:

1. Don’t be shy to show your emotions, but don’t be a hot mess! Emotions make leaders more authentic; they contextualize your passion for important work and they help others “get” where you’re coming from. At the same time, remember that resonant leaders mindfully transmit vision, hope and a “can do” spirit and they mindfully regulate emotions that undermine confidence in themselves and in others.

2. Maintain your presence even when others around you are in a funk. Remember, emotions can be quite transient–they come and they go. If someone around you is upset, the worst thing you can do is let their emotional forcefield erode your equanimity or cause you to allow your own emotions to run amok.

3. Listen, just listen. People have a better chance of figuring things out for themselves when they can hear themselves think out loud. When it comes to helping others face their most vexing problems, listening without trying to fix or to solve the problem almost always leads to insight and may even lead to uncanny answers.

4. Be humble and open. Research from UC Berkeley found that newly hatched leaders tend to “eat more cookies, chew with their mouths open, and leave more crumbs.” The implications of this study are as important for veteran leaders as they are for novice leaders: Don’t take yourself so seriously that you fail to notice if you’re the one absorbing all the oxygen in the room. Turn to those around you and bring out the best in them.

5. Renew. It really is difficult to be a resonant leader when you are exhausted, depressed, uninspired, or overwhelmed. Serious leadership work means you cannotrest (you can’t ever stop doing what good leaders do), but you absolutely must renew. Renewal means care taking your spirit, your mind, your body and your relationships. When you renew, you not only have energy to be fully present in your interactions with others, but you also set an example that can transform the entire culture for the better.